(Medical Xpress)—If you meet someone who speaks another language that you do not understand, you may not just miss what is being said but what is being perceived. Prof. Panos Athanasopoulos of Lancaster ...

Researchers at Carlos III Universidad de Madrid have developed a system for detecting adverse effects of pharmaceutical drugs by tracking information generated by patients on specialized blogs or social networks ...

An accurate system for tracking the quality of colonoscopies and determining the appropriate intervals between these procedures could contribute to both better health outcomes and lower costs. Clinician-researchers from the ...

High quality centre-based childcare appears to prevent the development of language and behavioural difficulties over time, particularly among vulnerable children. The factors that appear to affect children ...

Crowdsourcing – where responses to a task are aggregated across a large number of individuals recruited online – can be an effective tool for rating sounds in speech disorders research, according to a ...

For 150 years, the iconic Broca's area of the brain has been recognized as the command center for human speech, including vocalization. Now, scientists at UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University in Maryland ...

Latinos are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States, with their numbers having risen 243 percent since 1980. Yet the number of Latino physicians per 100,000 Latinos has declined by 22 ...

"Atesi" - what sounds like a word from the Elven language of Lord of the Rings is actually a Vimmish word meaning "thought". Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences ...

It has been described as an epidemic of modern times and perhaps felt more acutely in Canada's First Nations communities than anywhere else. Over the past several decades diabetes has become a prevalent health concern among ...

Language

A language is a system for encoding information. In its most common use, the term refers to so-called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. In linguistics the term is extended to refer to the human cognitive facility of creating and using language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation and usage of systems of symbols—each referring to linguistic concepts with semantic or logical or otherwise expressive meanings.

The most obvious manifestations are spoken languages such as English or Spoken Chinese. However, there are also written languages and other systems of visual symbols such as sign languages.

Although some other animals make use of quite sophisticated communicative systems, and these are sometimes casually referred to as animal language, none of these are known to make use of all of the properties that linguists use to define language in the strict sense.

When discussed more technically as a general phenomenon then, "language" always implies a particular type of human thought which can be present even when communication is not the result, and this way of thinking is also sometimes treated as indistinguishable from language itself.

In Western Philosophy for example, language has long been closely associated with reason, which is also a uniquely human way of using symbols. In Ancient Greek philosophical terminology, the same word, logos, was used as a term for both language or speech and reason, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes used the English word "speech" so that it similarly could refer to reason, as will be discussed below.